Why Go Retro in 2022? (Part 1: Vintage Computing)
I like retro tech. Like, really like retro tech. I would say in a given week I spend about 40% of my computing and/or gaming time on vintage or retro devices; whether that be writing on a computer that most people wouldn’t give a second thought to, or playing games that are older than at least two of my children combined. It’s a weird hobby, I know, but it’s one that I — and quite a few others like me — really enjoy.
VINTAGE COMPUTING
Now let’s be real here; when I need to get real work done – whether that be at my day job in IT, or taking care of household responsibilities – I will use a modern computer like everyone else. Windows 10 and 11 are much more secure than Windows 98 or XP, and modern macOS is far and away more usable today than older versions of OS X, not to mention the Classic Mac OS of the 80’s and 90’s. But while modern computers are useful, they just aren’t that fun to me anymore. In fact, the only modern operating systems I still find genuinely enjoyable to use on a regular basis are Linux, OpenBSD, and Haiku. There is just something charming about old tech. The hardware build quality was usually far above what we’re used to today, and the software – while limited by today’s standards – is so much more efficient and lightweight without sacrificing quality.
The number one thing I hear from people when they ask me why I am into vintage computings, is why would you want to use something that is old and less powerful than what you have today? Truth be told, there are a few answers to this question.
OLD MACHINES HAVE A LIGHT FOOTPRINT
Modern PCs and modern Macs need A TON of resources to operate even at their lowest system requirements. For example, to run Windows 11 you need AT LEAST:
A dual core, 1 GHz CPU from Microsoft’s “approved list”,
4 GB of RAM, and I kid you not,
64 GB of storage… just for the operating system
The 4 GB memory requirement is pretty standard at this point, and has been for some time but 64 GB of disk space? That is insane to me, and this number has been increasing for going on fifteen years now. You have to actually go all the way back to Windows XP to find a system with reasonable requirements with its 64 MB memory and 1.5 GB storage minimum needs. And lest you think I am only here to pick on Windows, Apple isn’t much better with its 44 GB of disk space for the latest version of macOS 12 Monterey. Of course, that’s for a fresh install. If you’re upgrading from Big Sur, you need the same 64 GB of space that Windows 11 requires.
Even some modern GNU/Linux distros have been falling into this trap. Ubuntu. for example, requires a hearty 25 GB of space in addition to the now standard 4 GB of memory. Fedora requires 10 GB of space, though it’s much more respectable with its 1 GB memory requirement but we all know that wouldn’t be a terribly great desktop experience. You end up having to look at smaller lightweight distros and desktop environments to try and get close to something along the lines of a retro system.
For example, my preferred vintage laptop is a T42 ThinkPad from 2004. I love that laptop, and really enjoy writing on it. I’ve blown away and re-installed more operating systems that I can recall ranging from alternatives like FreeDOS and Haiku, to vintage Linux distros, and I even got Windows 7 to run (albeit quite slowly). It’s a 32-bit Pentium M laptop. I upgraded the memory to it’s maximum capacity of 2 GB and it runs older systems magnificently. FreeDOS, XP, and Haiku all ran great, and it’s currently got Windows 2000 Professional installed which has been a delight. The one time I was able to actually run a modern Linux distribution with up-to-date packages and security patches required me to install Arch by modifying the wiki guide to work with the deprecated 32-bit kernel. It took a little while, but the install worked and it ran great until I tried installing a modern desktop environment to use. I’m not even talking about Gnome or KDE. I installed the MATE desktop and it crippled the machine. Even XFCE gave it a run for it’s money.
All in all, vintage machines just required so much less in terms of hardware and it was fantastic. They’re not the flashiest things on the planet, but they work well, and can still look pretty nice. For instance, I am actually writing this post in AppleWorks 6 on a blue and white PowerMac G3 from 1999 running classic Mac OS 9.2.2. The desktop is your traditional desktop with a few icons and a menu bar. I’m using the blueberry lolipop theme which matches the G3 tower’s design language and it gives the desktop a bit of character we don’t see much of anymore; but the most important thing about it is that it’s running amazingly well for a nearly twenty-three year old machine on 320 MB of memory (it only required 40 MB) and the OS only take up 150 MB of disk space. That is what I call a light footprint.
OLD SOFTWARE FTW!
Yes, modern software is undeniably better when it comes to compatibility and features. Yes, modern software benefits from decades of Internet developement allowing for easier and faster development and distribution of updates and patches. Yes, modern software has an inherent advantage of utilizing cloud-based technologies to seamlessly and flawlessly sync data across networks and devices in an instant. That is all great, and honestly really cool. Those things are the reason I use modern computers and software. It makes a hybrid work schedule easy to pull off when I can have everything from my iMac in the office at work — files, apps, browser tabs, and bookmarks — automatically sync over to my MacBook at the house; but there is something nice about using old software, and the manual nature of it.
Consider, though, the way we used to do things. If you wanted to take a file from one computer to another, you had to figure out a way to transfer it. Today, we might send it over as an email attachment, or share a link to the file in our DropBox, OneDrive, iCloud Drive, or Google Drive. If your sharing from one Apple device to another, maybe you’ll AirDrop it over. Regardless of the method, it’s likely that you’d be using some sort of wireless and/or internet based solution to make it happen. In the old days, we would use some sort of removable media: a USB flash drive, a CD-R/RW, or a floppy disk. That was how I used to print all of my college papers out. I would do the work on my Windows XP desktop in my dorm room, throw the file onto my trusty 512 MB flash drive (USB 1.1 mind you, so it was slow as molasses), walk down to the library on campus, and print it from there. Sure, it was a bit of a pain back then, and if I’d had access to a printer in my room, or a better digital way of handling it, I probably would have gone that route; but having to (in a sense) physically manage our data made us more responsible with our data. It only took losing hours of work one time to remember to save often, and it only took one time of losing some family photos to learn the importance of backups.
I will not argue that new software isn’t better, because I would say it’s pretty obvious that it is. But it often lacks the manual elelments of computing that let you really feel like you are operating your computer rather than just experiencing it.
THE JOYS OF TROUBLESHOOTING
Not all of the vintage computing experience is sunshine and rainbows, though. It’s old tech and that means there will be problems. Sometimes it’s a corrupted registry key in Windows — though to be fair, that’s something you’ll eventually run into on modern Windows too. Sometimes your vintage Mac won’t load your OS 8 or 9 instance properly and you have to spend an hour or two digging through ten to fifteen-year-old forum posts and blogs trying to figure out how to rebuild the desktop and why in the world that’s even a thing?! Sometimes you’ll have to figure out how hard drive jumpers work so you can replace the dying IDE drive in your old PC, only to find an excellent community of enthusiasts who have been there long before you and now there are special adapters that let you use modern hardware to upgrade your vintage machines.
As frustrating as technical errors and failures can be, they help us to learn and grow and that’s not just limited to old computers. In 2010 I had enough of Windows Vista and rather than upgrading to Windows 7 or downgrading to XP, I jumped over to Linux. There was a big learning curve. There was no C: drive, no registry, and the file system was completely different. I had to do a lot of things I didn’t understand in a command line terminal but somehow it fixed my sound and wifi drivers so I could go to YouTube, but eventually I learned what those commands did and started to get it.
In 2016, my Linux laptop died. I plugged it into the wall to charge as I did every day, there was a pop, and the thing never turned on again so I started using an old MacBook from 2009 that my wife and I had inherited from her grandfather. At first I really didn’t like it. OS X struck me as a really weird sort-of-but-not-really-Linux, but eventually I learned the differences in the Mac and Linux file systems. They were similar in someways, but quite different in others. The way applications were installed and run was very different. The user interface and the limitations that Apple used took A LOT of getting used to. It took me about ten minutes to figure out that I had to click a silly little lock icon to make admin changes in System Preferences because I was used to working in an environment that gave me the option to do stupid and dangerous things like permanently delete my entire root file system with a single command and password.
I bring these examples up because they required me to read and to research to solve my problems. It’s a big reason why I’m in the career I am today. Had I never jumped over to Linux, I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to learn anything other than Windows. Now I manage Linux servers and endpoints at work on a near-daily basis. If my laptop hadn’t died I know I never would have given macOS a chance, but now it’s my daily driver at work and at home, and I’m responsible for supporting all of the other Mac users at work.
Professional developement aside, troubleshooting can be fun — infuriating at times, but still fun. Last year I took my first step into the crazy world of classic Mac OS. It’s cool, but it’s weird. I had no idea going into it that it wasn’t Unix-based like OS X and Linux. I spent a good five to ten minutes looking for the terminal, but there wasn’t one. One day I booted the computer and my desktop didn’t load. I found out later that sometimes that’s a thing in classic Mac OS and it has to be rebuilt. I also found and joined up with a small but robust community of vintage Mac users who share my interest for this cool old tech and they’ve pointed me in the direction of online resourcses for classic Mac software and hardware upgrades. It’s been a really cool experience overall.
WHY GO RETRO IN 2022?
There’s more I could say, but this post is already getting quite long and I have plans for a part 2 and 3 on retro gaming and retro audio respectivley so I will do my best to be brief.
Retro-living isn’t for everyone. If you’re one of those people who just uses whatever technology they’re given or you just really don’t care about technology at all, then it’s safe to assume you probably wouldn’t care about this kind of stuff. Also, if that’s you, why are you still reading this? I mean, you’re welcome to stay, I’m glad you’re here… it’s just kind of weird, you know?
Retro-living is about having fun and using things you enjoy. I use a twenty-three-year-old Apple destkop and an eighteen-year-old IBM laptop because I enjoy them. I like the look, and the feel of them. I like the software they run, and I like being able to work without distraction because, to be honest, getting these things online isn’t the easiest task, and even then most websites won’t work on their old browsers anyway — and before anyone says anything, I know there are alternative browsers that still support many of these old systems, but I’m not talking about them right now.
I play retro games because they’re fun. A lot of my collection is made up of games that I’ve had since I was a kid, but a lot of it is also made up of games and consoles I never had when I was younger. Now I’m older, have a steady income, and the liberty to pick up things I wish I could have enjoyed when I was younger. That doesn’t mean I spend a lot of my time playing them because I’m busy, but they’re there for when I do have time.
I like to use retro audio gear like my Walkman, Discman, and iPod because they’re just enjoyable to use and there’s something cool about experiencing the evolution from fully analog to digital/analog and beyond; not to mention they’re great conversation starters.
So I guess the big take away is that there’s no one good reason to embrace retro and vintage tech in 2022, but if there’s something that you miss from your childhood or young adulthood why not try to find it and enjoy it now? And as much as technology has progressed over the last thirty to forty years, it’s not all been for the better. Sometimes embracing an older way of doing things can also be good for your mental health.
If there is something that jumps out to you that you just love to use, or that you remember fondly from years past, I’d love to hear about it as well. Until next time, take care everyone.